DR12 -Jolie Blon's Bounce

  Late that night a huge rental moving van lumbered down a state road outside town, followed by two big cars filled with men who looked straight ahead, somber, not talking to one another, their faces marked with purpose. The caravan passed through a black slum far out in the parish, crossed a bridge over a coulee, and turned down a shell road that led to a cluster of burial crypts in a cemetery by the bayou. The men piled out of the cars and unwound a firehose that had been stolen from an apartment building in Lafayette, then screwed the hose onto a fire hydrant by the side of the shell road. One man fitted a wrench on top of the hydrant and revolved it around and around until the hose was hard and stiff with pressurized water. They unlocked the back doors of the van and threw them back on the hinges, and the high-beam headlights from the cars lit up ten terrified black men inside. Two of the men from the cars, all of whom were white, pushed open the valve on the firehose and directed a skin-blistering jet of water inside the van, skittering the black men across the floor, blowing them against the walls,knocking them back down when they tried to rise, bursting against their faces and groins with the force of huge fists. The men from the cars gathered in a semicircle .to watch, lighting up cigarettes now, laughing in the iridescent spray that floated in the headlights. Then a man with a body as compact as a stack of bricks, with dead gray eyes and a haircut like a 1930s convict, walked into the light. He wore a suit with suspenders and only a formfitting, ribbed undershirt beneath the coat. "Get 'em out of there and line 'em up," he said. "Hey, Joe, some fun, huh?" one of the men on the . hose said, then looked at the man with dead eyes and went silent and shut off the valve on the nozzle. The men who had ridden in the two cars pulled the black men tumbling out of the van and shoved them through the cemetery to the edge of the bayou. When a black man looked back over his shoulder, he was hit with either a sap or a baton or kicked so hard between his buttocks, he had to fight to gain control of his sphincter. A few minutes later all of the black men stood in a row, most of them trembling uncontrollably now, looking across the water, their clothes molded wetly against their bodies, their fingers laced on top of their heads. The man with dead eyes walked up and down behind the row, staring at the back of each black man's head. "My name is Joe Zeroski. I got nothing against you personally. But you're pimps and rock dealers, and that means nobody cares what happens to you. You're gonna tell me what I want to know about my little girl. Her name was Linda, Linda Zeroski," he said. He pointed at the back of a huge black kid nicknamed Baby Huey, who had played football at Grambling before he had gone to prison for statutory rape. One of Joe's crew stepped forward with a stun gun cupped in his hand, an electrical thread of light crackling between the extended prongs. He touched the prongs to Baby Huey's back, which left Baby Huey writhing in the grass, his eyes bulging with shock. Joe looked down at him. "Who picked up my daughter on the corner?" he asked. "Washington Trahan was her manager. I didn't know nothing about her," Baby Huey said. "The piece of shit you call a manager blew town. That means you take his weight. You think about that the next time you see him," Joe said, and nodded to the man with the stun gun. When the man with the stun gun was finished, Baby Huey was curled in an embryonic ball, begging for his mother, shivering like a dog trying to pass glass. Joe Zeroski walked farther down the line, then paused behind a slender, light-skinned man with moles on his face and a mustache and hair that was buzzed on the temples and cut long in back. Joe nodded to the man with the stun gun, but suddenly the intended victim dropped his arms and shook his head violently, his eyes squeezed shut, crying out, "It was Tee Bobby Hulin. He did at least one white chick already. He always lookin' for white bread. Everybody on the corner know it. It's him, man." "I already checked him out. Four people put him in a club in St. Martinville," Joe said. "I got a pacemaker. Please don't do it, suh," the light-skinned man said, his voice and accent reverting to a subservient identity he had probably thought was no longer part of his life. The man with the stun gun waited. "Joe?" he said. He had an unshaved, morose face, with big jowls and eyebrows that were like shaggy hemp. His stomach was so large his shirt wouldn't tuck into his belt. "I'm thinking," Joe replied. "They're niggers, Joe. They start lying the day they come out of the womb," the man said. Joe Zeroski shook his head. "They got no percentage in standing up for a guy is hurting their business. Yall wait for me at the cars," he said. Joe Zeroski's crew drifted back through the crypts to their cars and the rented moving van. Joe stepped out in front of the black men and pulled a .45 automatic from his belt. He racked a round into the chamber and set the safety. "You guys kneel down. Don't move your hands from your head," he said. Joe waited until they were all on their knees, then-faces popping with sweat now, mosquitoes buzzing about their ears and nostrils, their eyes avoiding any contact with his. "You ever hear why some guys use a .22?" he said. "Because the bullet bounces around inside the skull and makes a mess in there. That story is shit. The guys use a .22 just don't like noise. So they got to put one through the temple, one in the ear, and one through the mouth. That's supposed to be a Mob hit. But it gets done that way just because some guys don't like noise. No other reason. "I carry ear plugs and use a gun that makes an exit hole like a half-dollar. See?" Joe screwed a rubber plug into his ear, then removed it and put it back in his coat pocket. "There's a building with a steeple on it across the bayou. You keep looking at it and don't turn around till sunrise. If you want your brains running out your nose, turn around while I'm still here. Remember my name. Joe Zeroski. You want to make yourself some cash, come see me with the name of the man killed my daughter. You want to lose your life, fuck with me just once." Minutes later the moving van and the two cars drove away. At dawn the pastor of a ramshackle fundamentalist church, with a wood cross and a facsimile of a bell tower nailed on the roof, walked down the sloping green lawn of his rectory to take his wash off the clothesline. He stopped in the mist drifting off the bayou and stared openmouthed at a row of black men kneeling on the opposite bank, their hands clasped on the crowns of their skulls like prisoners of war in a grainy black-and-white news film.

  CHAPTER 11

  The sheriff was surprisingly calm and reflective as he sat down in my office Monday morning. "For years I've been trying to put these pimps and drug dealers out of business. Then the goddamn Mafia comes in and does it in one night," he said. "They'll be back," I said. "What do you know about this guy Zeroski?" "He's an old-time mechanic. Supposedly, he hung it up after he accidentally shot a child by the St. Thomas Project." "Eventually we've got to run him out of town. You know that, huh?" "Easier said than done," I replied. The sheriff got up from his chair and gazed out the window at the old crypts in St. Peter's Cemetery. "Who beat you up, Dave?" he said.

  At noon I signed out of the office to interview a woman in St. Mary Parish, down the bayou, who claimed to have awakened in the middle of the night to find a man standing over her. She said the man had worn leather gloves and a rubber mask made in the image of Alfred E. Neuman, the grinning idiot on the cover of Mad magazine. The man had tried to suffocate her by pressing his hands down on her mouth and nose, then had fled when the woman's dog attacked him. Unfortunately for her, she was uneducated and poor, a cleaning woman at a motel behind a truck stop, and had filed reports of attempted rape twice in the past. The city police had blown off her claims, and I was about to do the same when she said, "He smelled sweet inside his mask, like there was mint on his breath. He was trembling all over." Then her work-worn face creased with shame. "He touched me in private places." It wasn't the kind of detail that people imagined or manufactured. But if the intruder at her home had any connection to the death of either Linda Zeroski or Amanda Boudreau, I couldn't find it. I handed her my business card. "You coming back to hep me?" she said, looking up at me from a kitchen chair. "I work in Iberia Parish. I don't have any authority here," I said. "Then why you got me to tell you all them personal t'ings?" she asked. I had no answer. I left my card on her kitchen table. An hour later I asked a cop at the entrance of the casino on the Indi
an reservation where I could find the mannamed Legion, then walked inside, into the smell of refrigerated cigarette smoke and rug cleaner, through banks of slot and video-poker machines, past crap and blackjack tables and a fast-food bar and an artificial pond with a painted backdrop that was meant to look like a cypress swamp, a stone alligator half submerged in the water, its mouth yawning open among the coins that had been thrown at it. The man named Legion was at the bar in a darkened cocktail lounge, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette in front of a mirror that was trimmed with red and purple neon. His eyes looked at me indifferently in the mirror when I sat down on the stool next to him and hung my cane from the edge of the bar. A waitress in a short black skirt and fishnet stockings set a napkin down in front of me and smiled. "What will you have?" she asked. "A Dr Pepper on ice with some cherries in it. Mr. Legion here knows me. He comes around to my house sometimes. Put it on his tab," I said. At first she thought she was listening to a private joke between Legion and me, then she glanced at his face and her smile went away and she made my drink without looking up from the drainboard. I hooked my coat behind the butt of the .45 automatic I carried in a clip-on holster. "T'es un pederaste, Legion?" I asked. His eyes locked on mine in the mirror. Then he brought his cigarette up to his mouth and exhaled smoke through his nose and tipped the ash into his coffee saucer, his eyes following the woman behind the bar now. "You don't talk French?" I said. "Not wit' just anybody." "I'll ask you in English. You a homosexual, Legion?" "I know what you doin'. It ain't gonna work, no," he replied. "Because that's the impression you left me with. Maybe raping those black women convinced you there's not a girl buried down inside you." He rotated the burning tip of his cigarette in his coffee saucer until the fire was dead. Then he fastened a button on his shirt pocket and straightened his tie and looked at his reflection in the mirror. "Go back to the kitchen and see if they got my dinner ready," he said to the barmaid. I turned on my stool so I was looking at his profile. "I'm a superstitious man, so I went to see a traiture about you," I lied. "My traiture friend says you got a gris-gris on you. Those women you forced yourself on, Mr. Julian, his poor wife who burned up in the fire, a man you murdered outside a bar in Morgan City? Their spirits all follow you around, Legion, everywhere you go." The skin wrinkled under his right eye. He turned his head slowly and stared into my face. "What man in Morgan City?" "He was a writer. From somewhere up North. You shot him outside a bar." "You found that in an old newspaper. It don't mean anyt'ing." "You shot him twice. His coat caught fire from the muzzle flash. The second time you shot him on the ground." His mouth parted and his eyes narrowed and stayed fixed on mine. From my shirt pocket I removed a dime I had drilled a hole through early that morning, then strung on a piece of looped red string. I pushed the dime across the bar toward his coffee cup. "The traiture said you should carry this on your ankle, Legion." "Like a nigger woman, huh?" he said, and pitched the dime into the bottles behind the bar. The barmaid came out of the kitchen with a tray. She took a plate of rice and gravy and stewed chicken and string beans off the tray and set it in front of Legion with a napkin and knife and fork. "Anything wrong here, Legion?" she asked. "Not wit' me," he replied, and tucked his napkin into his shirt and picked up his silverware. "Why would you kill a writer from up North?" I said. He leaned over his plate and opened his mouth to shovel in a fork piled with food. His face suddenly slanted sideways. Then I would have sworn his voice and accent actually changed, that it seemed to rumble and echo out of a cavern that was far larger in circumference and depth than his size. "You'd better leave me the fuck alone," it said. I felt my scalp recede against my skull. I got up from my stool, my face suddenly cold and moist in the air-conditioning. I wiped my forehead on my coat sleeve and picked up my cane. When I did, the man called Legion looked ordinary again, a workingman bent over his dinner, his lips smacking his food. But my heart was still racing. As I stared at his back, Iwas determined that whatever fear he had engendered in me would not be one I walked out of the room with. "This time I'll give you something to remember. Just so you'll know what it's going to be like every time we meet," I said, and pulled his plate sideways and spit in it.

  Clete came into the bait shop on Wednesday afternoon, his hair and eyebrows freshly trimmed, wearing new slacks and a starched shirt and a gold neck chain and religious medal I'd never seen before. "Want to wet a line?" I asked. "No, not really. Just thought I'd drop by." "I see," I said. "I took Barbara Shanahan to a luncheon on Monday," he said. "A luncheon?" "Yeah, at the country club. It was full of lawyers. Last night we went to a lawn party on Spanish Lake. The governor was there." "No kidding? Who else?" "Perry LaSalle." "Was he at the luncheon, too?" "Yeah, I guess." Clete was sitting on one of the counter stools now, drumming his nails on the Formica. He looked up at me. "You saying Barbara's using me to jerk LaSalle around?" The phone rang and I didn't have to answer his question. After I hung up, I turned around and Clete was staring out the screened window at the bream popping the surface among the lily pads on the far side of the bayou. Three long lines, like strands of wire, were stretched across his forehead. "What's wrong, podna?" I asked. "Last night I told Barbara I liked her a lot. I also told her maybe she was carrying a torch for a guy I don't have much respect for, but if that was her choice, I could boogie on down the road." "How'd she take it?" "She got mad." "Her loss. Blow it off." "That's not all of it. She lives in this apartment on the bayou. I'm downstairs, on my way to the parking lot, and here she comes down the staircase. She apologizes. The moon's up, the azaleas and the bougainvillea and wisteria are blooming. She's standing there in her hose, her shoes off, her face like a little girl's. She takes me by the arm and leads backup the stairs again. Dave, stuff like this doesn't happen to guys like me with women like that. I kissed her in the living room and rockets went off in my head." "Uh, maybe you don't need to tell me any more, Cletus." "There's a knock at the door." "LaSalle?" "No, some peckerwood who sells magazines and Bibles. His name is Marvin something or another." "Marvin Oates?" "Yeah, that's the guy. A real con man. He's got this hush-puppy accent and pitiful look on his face, like the orphanage just slammed the door on his nose. But Barbara laps it up, fixing him a sandwich and pouring a glass of milk for him, asking him if he wants some ice cream and melted chocolate to go with it. It was sickening. She said she'd forgotten she'd told Marvin to drop by, which meant I was supposed to leave." I picked up two freshwater rods that were propped in the corner, the Mepps spinners on the lines snugged into the cork handles. I tossed one to Clete. "Let's entertain the bass," I said. "There's more," he said. His green eyes flicked sideways at me. His face was pink and oily with perspiration under the light, his fresh haircut like a little boy's. I sat down next to him and tried not to look at my watch. "So what's the rest of it?" I asked, feigning as much interest as I could. "I was back at my motel, just about asleep, when a car pulls up in front of Zerelda Calucci's cottage. Guess who?" he said. "Perry LaSalle again. Like everywhere I go I see Perry LaSalle. Like any broad around here I'm interested in has got a thing with Perry LaSalle. Except this time he's getting his genitalia ripped out. "Zerelda calls him a douche bag and a brain-dead horse dick, then picks up a flowerpot off the walk and smashes it on the dashboard of his convertible. "I hear his car leave and I think, Ah, I can get some sleep. Ten minutes later Zerelda taps on my door. Man, she was drop-dead beautiful, with those big ta-tas and pale skin and black hair full of lights and fire-alarm lipstick, and she's holding this big, sweaty bottle of cold duck, and she says, 'Hey, Irish. I've just had the worst fucking night of my life. Feel like hearing about it?' "And I'm telling myself, Go back to sleep, Clete. Barbara Shanahan waits for you in the morning. Wet dream of the Mafia or not, no Sicilian skivvy runs tonight. "Those thoughts lasted about two seconds. Guess which podjo of yours got fucked on the ceiling last nightand fucked on the ceiling and floor and in the shower and every other surface of the room this morning?" "I don't believe it." "I don't, either. Except I'm having dinner with her this evening." "With Joe Zero
ski's niece?" I said. "Yeah. I think I just took Perry LaSalle's place. You and Bootsie want to join us?" He looked at me expectantly. "I think we're supposed to go to the PTA tonight," I replied. "Right. I forgot you were tight with the PTA," he said. He stood up and put on his hat. "By the way, I found out where that guy Legion lives. I let him know the Bobsey twins from Homicide are a factor in his life." "You did what?"